The Truth, the Whole Truth,
and Something Like the Truth

For most of my college years I was in thrall to Not-Naomi. But I mean that in a good way. She easily deserves the less-than-coveted All-time First Girlfriend Prize. I could go on at exhaustive length to convince you how she qualifies, but this is the clincher for me: we’re still friends. At an early stage of our liaison, she passed along what her uncannily perceptive, professorial mother said about what you must know by now is a favorite subject of mine: me. Her mom made the observation that Joe obviously raised himself. When people raise themselves, she added, they often have a void they spend their whole lives trying to fill. Her brilliant, incandescently literate daughter had witnessed that chaotic project firsthand for herself. Who knows? Maybe Mom was not so subtly suggesting to her child that she ought to run for the hills.

Whaddayou, Not-Naomi’s mom, writin’ a book?

I took the point. Did I have a choice? I had taken it before, and since then I have never stopped taking it and I expect I always will. For a long while I had been intellectually infatuated with the concept of the void; the whole madcap gang of once-upon-a-time fashionable existentialists and nihilists and relativists and anarchists spoke to me in a language I thought I could access. Saint John of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul” probably did not amount to the void, but the distinction was as a practical matter missed by me. And Camus and Nietzsche and Heidegger and Kafka and Beckett? Common sense.

I think most of us have some sense of the void’s existence. Many of us have been at least accidental tourists or unenthusiastic visitors passing through, some of us are resident aliens, a few of us connoisseurs or citizens, reluctant or otherwise.

So yes, indeed, the void. Dot dot dot.

My brother John attempted to fill the void in his own fashion, mainlining smack and committing crimes required to sustain his habit, struggling to survive his years in prison and on the street. He was a wounded soul. But in other ways and at other times, he also filled it with his abiding friendships and loyalties, and the spillage of an overflowing big heart. One way he was never able to fill that void was with the love of his parents: either the love they had for him, or his for them. Whatever they offered him in the name of parental love wasn’t adequate. I can hold them accountable, and I often have, but that doesn’t seem justified, quite. Drug addiction is merciless. Sooner or later, it crushes everybody in its purview, if given a chance. I do know for sure that the void swallowed John up.

I could say something similar about my dad. He tried to fill his void with gambling, with the thrill of the action, with the excitement of his criminality, with taking untenable risks. Later he attempted something comparable with his dedicated union work. I do think he valued, in some primitive sense, his family, but we weren’t up to the task. I am confident when I say that in his mind we all let him down. His marriage made him miserable, but it was the best he could do.

I’d like to put in a few paltry semi-good words for the void.

As for me, well, the void got the best of me sometimes, I cannot deny or dispute it. There are those nights when emptiness can seem almost beautiful and bracing. Other nights, not so much. What’s more, I don’t know that people like me can ever perfectly or permanently fill the void. The emptiness and the darkness have their allure, which is not the word, for a depressed person. It certainly had such sway over me. I have spent the greater part of my life filling that emptiness with whatever I could, hoping for something to stick. In the past, with manic romantic entanglements or with drugs. More productively and sanely, and more recently, with my own work, reading and writing and teaching. A class that goes well, working with a student who is touched by self-understanding, those are fulfilling experiences. And finding the right words, shaping a poem or a novel, those are fine, lasting things. Not to mention marriage to a loving mate—who has proven to be a lifesaver. And a connection with a loving son, and his family, including grandkids. And friendships that I cannot imagine being without.

What about my spiritual life, if such a hallowed term could be applied to my endless search and riddling doubt? Good question, and fair. That’s harder to talk about. And potentially an invitation to utter cringeworthy admissions. For one thing, I am disgusted by the endemic religious posturing in American culture, which is most glaringly in evidence on the part of politicians seeking votes by piously stipulating Jesus is Lord. If you’re like me, when you hear these clowns, don’t you want to punch them in their hypocritical noses? On this score, I have a dream. My dream is one day to throw in with a presidential candidate who replies, when interrogated about his or her religious convictions, “None of your business.” A candidate reminiscent of the acerbic basketball coach genius Greg Popovich. Either somebody like that or an atheist who can understand the Constitution of this secular nation. For all the culturally dated piety about “one nation under God,” the game-changing experiment that is the United States of America is founded not only upon the separation of church and state (or is it church and taste?) but equality, and it’s built upon the rock of religious tolerance, specifically tolerance for un- and non- and disbelief. Amen.

Since I have referenced throughout how my little boy’s faith mattered so much to me—should I say saved me?—I feel an obligation to follow up here with an account of my adult take. Here goes, such as it is. My Catholicism works for me, a fair amount of the time. When I was a tyke clutching at straws, that was one thing. Now, it’s decidedly different, though the continuum between then and now is real. I’m no proselytizer, but I think Pope Francis might be up to something pretty good. We’ll see what is his whole plan, though he has made a terrific start on climate change and on his full-throated emphasis upon serving the poor. (With your blessing, Your Holiness, were I you and I’m obviously not, I would push the Church to get over itself immediately on contraception, on gay marriage, on female clergy, and on priestly celibacy. As you said, “Who am I to judge?” Just saying, with respect, and thank you.)

I recognize that some worthy Catholics may not regard my Catholicism as Catholicism at all. I almost wish I possessed their self-gratulatory assurance. To them I would say, with all the charity I can muster, fuck the fuck off, please, and take your Jansenistic baggage with you as you deplane. (Jansenism is the namesake heresy attributed to the seventeenth century ultimate wet blanket of a Bishop Jansen who held no party spellbound hyperventilating the message that grace is available to the select few, the kind of guy who hides the IPA away from the mitts of nothing nobodies.) And as for those who find allegiance to any type of Catholicism intellectually indefensible if not comically naïve, I am comforted that these critics have figured out their lives. Yes, the pedophilia scandal is no mere blip on the screen. The all-too-human political institution of the Catholic Church crushed children, ruined families, failed itself. It will take generations to recover, if it ever does. I am able to make the skeptics’ case—I have in fact made their case—but it doesn’t ultimately hold water for me. I almost wish I had command of their depthless certainty.

Beyond that, I have not much more to add. In general, I feel I have a long way to go before understanding what this all means, but here’s what I do know, and it’s the only leg I have to stand on. The rituals have power for me. The days, the moments, when I feel the presence of something sacred in my life make the mystery and confusion and yes, the void, for a minute anyway, tolerable.

“The road of excess,” wrote William Blake, “leads to the palace of wisdom.”

Tell me about it.

No, really, somebody please tell me about it.

Blake also wrote in the same poem, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

•

In some sense, a work of memory aspires to escape the past in order to illuminate or somehow inform, if not quite authenticate, the present. At least the author of such a work aspires as much. A memoir aspires to inhabit history so as to wrest meaning not merely from the past but to discover it in the present. But what does the present mean? To what extent is it knowable? The tricky part is that the one way to begin to understand where one has been before is to see where one is now. Only that now is a treacherously slippery place upon which to gain footing. Sometimes it’s an oil slick, and you take a messy, grease-monkey tumble. Sometimes it’s a frozen pond, which is melting beneath you in the springtime. Maybe you keep skating, oscillating between the past and the prospect of the future, all to the end of understanding the now. That’s why the facts and the recollections, however conceptualized, are in service of a narrative, which is an account, a version, a selection, a myth. But perhaps curiously, there’s a way in which crafting a fiction—a novel, a story, a poem—makes it less of a trial to tell the truth, because it’s all made up. To some extent the experience of one’s so-called real life informs an author’s fiction—as how could it, to some significant degree, not? Memoir is not for the faint of heart, and neither is ordinary existence.

Does my dad’s life amount to nothing more than a cautionary tale for me? That feels patently ridiculous. He had his own life, access to which is mine at best provisionally, partially, incompletely. I may be nothing but the wiseass, superior-sounding, full-of-himself punk who thinks he knows how to throw around uptown terms like “cautionary tale” with reference to my Brooklyn dad. He may have left the borough and the East Coast to save his own skin, but Brooklyn never left him. I could conceivably say the same about myself. And if there is any cautionary tale to be told, it might be this: my life constitutes the only cautionary tale I need for myself.

So what do I see in him? Was he a quester from Greenpoint, some smack-talking knight errant, viewed through the filter of my experience, my books, my memoirs? I could say yes and I could say no.

Did he determine the outlines of my life? Again, yes and no—and also maybe.

I have heard people say life is about making memories to treasure. But what if memory makes us who we are? Myth is a memory that never dies. Who am I then in the family myth, or the myth of myself?

•

My dad played the horses every day possible, borrowing money when necessary, paying it back after booking a winner, or borrowing money elsewhere to pay it back when he booked a loser. Back in Brooklyn, he had borrowed from loan sharks, “shylocks,” as he called them. A vicious cycle. He was addicted to what I presume to be the rush of the wager and the dream of the payoff, which I have to imagine sometimes, or rarely, got him back to square one, at which point the cycle played out again of borrowing and hoping to pay it all back if not being able to stiff creditors. He borrowed a few hundred from me a couple of times when I was fresh out of college, my first teaching job, pulling down a princely salary of $4,900 a year. He always paid it back, not that I was blasé about the risk I took. I am sympathetic. Well, now I am, when it is an abstract proposition. Back then, he induced a fear of impoverishment—his and my own.

At some point in California he started making much better money, and if he borrowed money ever again I have no idea. He gambled about every single day, and he lived his entire existence in California a mere few miles from Golden Gate Fields in Albany, to which he continually repaired. My mother railed against him without cease, to me, my brother, my wife, to anybody who was in the vicinity.

“The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).

“The lack of money is the root of all evil” (Mark Twain).

I wrote my dissertation at Berkeley on Mark Twain, specifically the period of his career when he himself was tap city, the 1890s, publishing and barnstorming and striking business deals, chasing bad money with good, doing anything to keep the wolf from the door, taking one commercial risk after another. It didn’t work, and then it worked, big time, because out of the ruins of his terrible business judgments, and his tragic family experience, he built the empire that was the public image of Mark Twain, great writer, great man, great American in his glorious white suit. This is a great country, which Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the first great anti-imperialist critic, took pains to excoriate.

•

Ever since Aristotle’s Poetics we have cultivated a notion of the tragic figure. As we remember the definition, some star-crossed people, through some characterological failing or moral flaw, combined with the force of circumstances beyond their control, or via the handiwork of their personal demons, plummet to their inevitable doom. For the classical philosopher, the dramatization of this tragic flaw, if done masterfully, produces in the audience a catharsis. Catharsis is Aristotle’s biological metaphor, referring to a kind of psychic, emotional purgation, analogized to other sorts of purgation, use your imagination. Catharsis for the audience is a welcome if wrenching release of pent-up emotion in response to the spectacle of the ruined tragic hero.

Nobody’s life can be usefully examined, finally, as a work of art, though my father was more than once called a piece of work, with the attendant pejorative connotations. And everyone who watches the unfolding of another’s life, from a close vantage point such as from within his family, hardly constitutes a theatrical audience. The theater is one or more removes away from family—though Oscar Wilde once called the Public an aggravated form of the family—and it takes a great artist to implicate a stranger in the drama of another. But it’s more complicated than that. For there is a way for me to understand my old man as somebody with genuine flaws. He was a dark and tortured soul who felt powerless before his ingrained desires and designs—what he called his vice. But that, I think, trivializes the issue, and him. The vice stood for something, a desire for meaning, and the thrill of taking risk, and the hope for self-validation.

•

I’m the last one standing in my family.

There was a time when I would have claimed this was no big deal, that I’d felt like an outlier for as long as I could remember.

Now, I am not too sure. Death clears the decks.

For whom, besides myself, am I writing this book? Who wantsta know? as the old man would say.

Death clarifies. It’s often observed we mourn someone we have lost, but also the loss of the connection we never had, the loss of the person we never knew. It’s a commonplace observation, but there it is. There’s nothing more commonplace than mortality. Mortality applies to the inevitably in everyone’s life. My death is mine, however, and it’s personal.

The things that might have happened—my mother happy, my father free of debt and money worry, my brother John content enough to survive in his own skin—never will happen because they never did happen. But to bring to mind the failed possibilities is important. Important to me, if nobody else, and perhaps to you, if you care for a minute or two.

I have a friend who is a building contractor, an excellent one. He’s a complex, smart, hardworking, principled man. More than anything, he’s a good man and, like many a good man, his life story is thorny: domestic turmoil, personal demons haunting him. He doesn’t talk much about that sort of thing, but sometimes you can catch a glimpse of the pain behind his eyes, not that he’s seeking your approval. He doesn’t need my sympathy, but I admire him. I could call him stoic, but that sells him short. He has vulnerabilities and emotional depths, and those depths may contribute to the excellence of his work.

Once I asked him, as he was completing the punch list during the last days of his work for us, what drove him. Was it seeing the pleasure, the satisfaction in others who benefited from his skill and dedication? He did not hesitate. No, that wasn’t it, not at all. It was all fine and good that his clients appreciated his work, but what pleased him was seeing for himself that he had done good work.

The question of the audience for a memoir, or any work of writing, is hard for me to answer. Who’s the audience? You got me.

•

Who’s going to win the Super Bowl, the NBA championship, the World Series, the Stanley Cup, the Kentucky Derby?

Say you have an idea. Say you pick your team, your town, your horse. That’s an opinion. This thought process of yours has absolutely nothing to do with taking the risk called making a wager. Yes, gambling on a game begins with a point of view, but that’s only the beginning. You have to calculate the odds, analyze the situation, study the matchups and so on. Either that, or take a flyer.

You’re still not close to gambling. Because when you finally put your money down, something takes place deep inside. It’s akin to fear. And also anxiety. And exhilaration, too. Your self-worth is at stake along with your cash. Only idiots lose bets, right? Wrong. And I can prove it. When you bet and you lose, that doesn’t tell your whole story. You hold a job, you enjoy some status in your world, you have people who love and need you. You don’t have soup stains on your shirt or cigar ashes on your lap—that describes the idiots who bet the farm. You’re simply losing. The waves of nausea overwhelm you. Are you a loser? How did you go from having an opinion about a game, or rooting for your hometown team to win, to feeling the humiliation of losing your money? No, you are not your money. It’s more complicated. But you are your money when you make your play. And then after the final score, when you rip up your betting slip and limp away from the betting window, there’s less of you than before.

•

Jesus is manhandled and scourged and brought up before the kangaroo court conducted by Pontius Pilate. Upon being questioned, Jesus says he has come into the world to testify to nothing less than the truth. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

To which the son-of-a-bitch imperial functionary says: “What is truth?”

This might have been a good question had a better man asked it and asked it honestly—by which I mean unrhetorically. And though he finds no fault in Jesus, he does not let him go. Instead, insofar as it is the custom to free somebody on an occasion such as this, he asks the rabble what they want. In one voice, they cry out that they want a bandit named Barabbas to be exonerated and freed, and Pilate accedes, washing his hands. The world has not been the same since.

•

For a while, in my forties, I was the associate head and academic dean of a Catholic high school. In fact, this was my alma mater, where I was once student body president and from which my brother had been expelled—to his great delight, I might add. It was not the best job I’d ever had, but the finest moments for me involved dealing with students who had committed acts of academic dishonesty, like plagiarism and cheating. As the culture of the school had devolved into a disaster, I had about one hundred cases land on my desk in my first year—this in a student body of fewer than four hundred.

This may sound surprising, but my conversations with kids in such straits were almost universally moving and deep, prying open, as they did, windows into their hearts, their minds, their souls, not to mention their families. The talks could go on for hours, and over multiple sessions. And there was never a dull moment. Ninety/ninety-five percent of the time, the results were positive. Most kids ultimately took responsibility, though usually not at first, and they began to understand what drove them. I haven’t worked in a school for a long time now, and every school year with regularity appear articles and studies that purportedly show that cheating is suddenly an epidemic. I think it probably always has been and always will be. Until kids learn to reflect upon their own integrity—that is, until they’re explicitly “invited” while undergoing some sort of crisis to reflect upon who they are—cheating is hard to resist.

Some kids walked into my office defiant, threatening legal action. Some kids, terrified, fearful some black mark was going to “go on their record.” But no two cheaters—and no two teenagers—are the same. If you work with adolescents and fail to grasp that truth, you probably won’t last long—they will eat you alive. If, that is, a vice principal like me doesn’t scope that out and counsel you into another profession.

Kids cheat for all sorts of reasons besides getting a better grade, though of course for some that seems to be the whole plan. Some kids cheat to please their parents, to live up to an idea their parents hold up for them, to increase their GPA in order to get into a “better college.” Some kids cheat because teachers give them impossible assignments, or because they don’t have the skills to manage the academic demands of the class. But since teenagers usually fake that they know more than they actually do, cheating feels like a natural opportunity.

The conversations eventually pivoted, if they did at all, when I saw my opening to say something like, “It’s hard to be honest all the time.” I am not suggesting there’s a script I devised and followed, because there wasn’t and I didn’t. But in the moment, when an adult in my position owns up to the challenge of being honest, I found that a teenager gives himself permission to acknowledge he has made a mistake. “We all make mistakes. I made mistakes I have always regretted.” I never told them this next part, but I cheated once in school, and didn’t get caught, but I have never forgotten the whole sordid deal. I didn’t tell them as much, because teenagers have practically zero tolerance for adult disclosures along those lines, when the old people were drunk or dishonest or stupid. A parent might get away with that once during high school, twice at the most, but it’s mostly a non-starter, and here’s why. Teenagers feel they are the exception to every rule. You might have learned from your mishaps, but it has nothing to do with your children; they are unique. Just ask them.

This goes to the next big moment. What the academic dean gets them to acknowledge is that, in their value scheme, there is almost nothing more important than being yourself. What follows from that is a question that blows up the conversation:

“So if being true to yourself is so important, then misrepresenting yourself in a paper or a test doesn’t help you, does it?”

I’m probably being crudely schematic here, but teenagers know what the truth is, and it’s valuable to them, too. I don’t care what those surveys show.

As for parents, that’s another story. Some families failed that test, they barged in blustery and threatening litigation or a punch in my nose (which did indeed happen), and as a consequence missed the opportunity to help their kids get through the ordeal. And they also missed the gift the school gave the whole family. Now that your child has cheated, and been caught, he has the opportunity to learn from that, and never do it again. It’s hard to be honest all the time.

Of course, a few psychologically borderline kids didn’t ever rise to the occasion, but many fewer than you’d expect. One sign of the proof: not very many of my students were repeat offenders. But there was one exception I remember.

Brian was a two-time offender. He was small of physical stature, even for a ninth grader, gentle of temper and clearly bright, and was popular enough not to qualify as an obvious candidate for being bullied. His dad was rock solid, too. He grasped what his son was going through, and he stood by the school, which was standing by his son. But now Brian was in significantly deeper trouble, having been caught again—I cannot remember the exact circumstances, but I believe it involved improperly sharing his work with another student on a test. He was an A student, by the way, and if you think A students don’t cheat, you would be kidding yourself. As for Brian, consequences needed to be real for him, and they were about to ratchet up considerably now.

I think I might have given him a one-day in-school suspension for his first offense, to get his attention. And now I put him on notice: if there were a third violation, expulsion was the next option on the table. He thanked me for another chance, and said he would keep the bargain and never cheat again. He would tell his friends who were pressuring him for answers to tests that he was on a short leash. He believed that, given the stakes, they wouldn’t put him in a bind again.

A week or so later, Brian knocked on my office door, downcast. He told me that he’d advised his friends what his situation was—and they were still pressuring him. He could not believe they were putting him in this spot. He was practically in tears when he realized, not that I can recall his words, he was now on his own. He could come to me any time he wanted and we could talk, but I couldn’t help him make his decisions in the moment he was being tested. He looked bereft, and I did my best to tell him that, finally, that’s all there is, being on your own when it came to becoming an honest man. It isn’t easy being honest, ever.

As far as I am aware, Brian never got in school trouble again, and I have every reason to hope he has been living a good and full life, yet I think about him—and I can visualize his crestfallen face—and hope that he was not permanently disillusioned. Then again, what did I know? Well, if I knew anything in the world, I did know it was hard to be honest all the time.

•

My best friend since the seventh grade, someone behind whom I sat at my desk in our Catholic school in Berkeley, and who later became my son’s godfather, tells a story. When his son was six or seven, the boy was mixing it up with a chum, boisterously talking trash in the backyard. From inside the house, Bernie eavesdropped on them going at it. They were doing the my-dad-is-better-than-your-dad dozens. My dad is stronger than your dad, my dad can run faster than your dad, my dad can hit a baseball farther than your dad—that sort of thing. Finally, Bernie’s son had had enough:

“Yeah, well, my dad has a bigger penis.”

And Bernie said to himself, “You tell him, Joel.”

•

Did I secretly wish my father had been not some small-time hood, but a John Gotti? I could answer that either way and be telling the truth.

Would I really have wished him to be somebody out of Goodfellas?

Really?

I think of my oldest grandson, first born of my only son. If you were in my vicinity, I could be showing you photogenic snaps of him and his two siblings on my phone, so consider yourself off the hook. Once, we were waiting for a movie to begin, rainy day, he was seven or eight, and we wandered into a nearby bookstore in the mall till showtime came around. He’s a very bookish boy, the kind who used to carry Diary of a Wimpy Kid to the playground, so that was a congenial destination for him. As it happened, a book of mine was then being featured in the new books section. By reflex, I took it down to have a look, can’t quite explain. He noticed what I was doing and had a question:

“You really like yourself, don’t you?” Then we both cracked up, he got me.

Another time, he wanted to know:

“Nonno, are you famous?”

I tell him no, not at all.

But he isn’t satisfied, I can tell, and he badly wants to believe otherwise.

At some later point I was walking him and his friend home from school—perhaps when he was nine. His pal wanted to know who was the old guy trailing, keeping them company.

“That’s my nonno, he’s a famous author.”

He likes to take down books from my shelves. Once without warning he spent a few hours reading my novel All for Now, though what he was taking in was hard for me to determine. I hoped he wasn’t understanding it, given the unremittingly R-rated jokes and the fundamentally tragic story. I didn’t want to snatch the book from his hands, because that would supercharge his curiosity and mystify the subject and the author. His wise, loving parents do their best to guide him in his reading. As he put it, “They don’t want me to read about things I don’t understand. They mean like sex. But I read stuff all the time I don’t understand.” (I’m looking forward to his adolescence.) In any case, that day, when he was ready, he and I tried to discuss what he took from the book of mine, didn’t get very far, which was comforting. Whew, close call. I told his father about the incident, and all Mario could say was it was just like his boy, but then he added: “Let’s keep him away from Subway to California for a long time.”

Once when he met some new kids, my son reported that as they were getting to know each other, what video games and music they liked, and so on, the boy asked the others, by way of an icebreaker, I suppose: “So, have you read All for Now?”

Do we all want the major figures in our lives to be larger than life? Yes, I suppose we might. Did I give over to that fantasy myself with my father? I think I probably did. Which is on one level crazy, and on another, normal.

•

Fathers and sons, bonded by their lies to each other. Separated by their truthfulness. Never ask a question you don’t know or want the answer to. Words for attorneys to live by, as well as by fathers and their sons. Also Russian novelists and Shakespeare. But I digress.

I began by searching out the predicate for our flight from Brooklyn to California. That led me into performing a type of exhumation of my past and my family’s.

Yes, it was traumatic for a ten-year-old boy like me to be abruptly, inexplicably uprooted from home and friends and dropped down—infinitely dropped, as Winnicott put it—in a state of incredible, awful beauty Didion would have her way with because it required that correction. And it was all about the lifesaving lies and necessary deceptions of my father. Lies told to preserve himself and his freedom.

And the trade-off for me was that eventually it proved mostly to my benefit, being liberated from Brooklyn to the fantastic city of Berkeley, with California being a land of inestimable opportunity. And sunshine. And no snow. Who knows what sort of life I might have led had I stayed? Not that such speculation is ultimately interesting to me.

•

As a child I was continually anxious and fearful, always on guard, listening for approaching footsteps, on the lookout for somebody coming up behind me, not necessarily figuratively, either. My condition ought not to be confused with PTSD. That would be overstatement. When I was eight or nine I took to carrying around for protection not a switchblade (as my older brother did) but a pocket knife, without a clear concept about what I would do with such an impractical weapon.

My compulsive behaviors, as early as when I was five or six, encouraged my mother to take me to the doctor. I was continually washing my hands. She recounted the story to me and others a hundred times and highlighted my beloved pediatrician’s diagnosis and prescription: no big deal, and I should slather lotion on my dried-out paws. Her account cut both ways. She wanted to prove that she was a good mother and I was a drama queen.

It took a long time to get some measure of control over the hand washing and my generalized compulsivity and anxiety. I must have employed a type of cognitive behavior therapy upon myself, not that I knew the term. Not surprisingly, when I was a young adult I found myself inside the offices of one psychotherapist after another.

Perhaps my favorite was one I found in California. He was a native New Yorker, and an eminent figure on the national psychological scene. He wrote a haunting, graphic book that tackled nothing less than the nature of evil, and he espoused the benefits of hypnosis, and he was hilarious and kind, and not too easy on me. I was never hypnotized (as far as I was aware) but he helped me face myself, including my debilitating obsessive checking and rechecking. It was deceptively simple, what he did.

What if, for instance, I left the keys in my car, he wanted to know, what would be the worst that could happen? We talked at length through this horrifying, to me, hypothetical. We grasped it was about the maintenance of a sense of order and control, since order and control were hardly ever givens in my mind. We could have chosen other equally dreadful hypotheticals that obsessed me, like leaving a door unlocked, like losing a button on my shirt, like parking the car outside the lines, like turning in a paper with a misspelled word.

I believe I know that the back door is definitely locked, but I don’t know the door is definitely locked, or know the door is definitely locked, or KNOW it, for that matter. Besides, what harm could it do, to check, to put my mind at rest? Mind at rest? That’s the plan? Good luck. Do you always talk to yourself when you’re checking? Yes, you got a problem with that?

And check a few more times.

And then a few more times more.

This whole exhausting project must sound loony tunes to a non-compulsive person. Good for you, non-compulsive person, you’re lucky. You probably also get to appointments on time, too.

Psychiatrists might have recently landed on a beta-blocker, propranolol, that, when combined with exposure therapy, seems to work wonders addressing or curing incapacitating anxieties. I myself am not pathological, therefore not a worthy candidate for the protocol. Because that day as my shrink and I talked through what it would mean to leave my keys or lose my keys, we—I mean I—reached this conclusion: the worst that could happen, whatever it was, was something I could survive. I wouldn’t perish, I wouldn’t crack up. I cannot explain how liberating this was to me. As I write these sentences now I cannot believe how such a simple idea flooded me with hopefulness. There was hope. Sometimes hope is enough.

But let’s go back. Did my childhood obsessive behaviors (which have persisted well into my adult life) connect to whatever level of trauma I experienced in my early home life? I could not say with any degree of certitude, but I never for a minute viewed myself as a victim. I construed my life as conforming to a type of norm, the way all children strive to do, no matter how apparently dysfunctional the family system would seem to an outsider. Yes, my family was normal and that was Brooklyn, notions that locked together like Legos. I never felt physically threatened in or by my home life, if, that is, I discount the high level of rage my parents expressed toward each other—which I probably shouldn’t do. Having an unreliable mother probably affected my conceptions of love and undermined my psychic security, but she’s not to blame for my poor romantic track record in the past. Having a mostly absentee father surely unsteadied my existential underpinnings, as did the anxiety he himself had to have felt, and unconsciously or consciously transmitted, while being under constant pressure as he gambled compulsively and lived his life of petty crime. The effects had to have been anything but negligible for him—and for me and my brother. And then the flight out of Brooklyn, taking that subway to California: that disturbed and angered me. It must have eroded any residual sense I had of order and control. Those tumultuous feelings I mostly repressed—repressed and then probably sublimated into schoolwork and my faith. I would also write poems, which I started doing around ten or eleven, and borrow stacks of library books, and seek out those brighter, warmer, organized, alternative worlds where I could take up residence. I may have been solitary but I felt welcomed by the disembodied presences located on the page. I was keeping company with all the figures of my imagination and I could bring them to life in my head and sometimes on the page.

•

Sometimes I’m asked when I “decided” to become a writer. It’s not something I know how to address. For one thing, I’m not so sure decision is the right term. I was always entranced by the idea of being a writer. Old Yeller, The Good Earth, Of Mice and Men, the stories of Flannery O’Connor and O. Henry, the poems of Stephen Crane and Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Carlos Williams—these works moved me as a boy, they made me wish to make such things on my own. Very early on, I remember reading what one writer said—cannot recall who, but it could have been any of a hundred—something to the effect, Don’t try to become a writer unless you cannot picture not being one. This ensnared my attention. But the admonition didn’t intimidate me at perhaps thirteen years old—definitely not the way pretty girls effortlessly did. Instead, the opposite: it emboldened me. Of course, I thought, of course, that’s right, and that’s me. It was related to a notion that transfixed me around the same time. I vividly recall my brilliant ninth grade English teacher (and he truly was, and by all accounts still is, brilliant) using in class a phrase exotic to me: vicarious experience. I struggled to wrap my mind around the idea of experiencing somebody else’s experience. After all, I was busy trying to have an experience or two of my own, even if it didn’t involve any of those pretty girls. And then it gradually clarified for me. Bingo, vicarious experience was literature’s best trick. And that was the thing, I would learn and relearn over and over, that keyed the pleasure, the work, the challenge of both the reader’s and the writer’s imagination. At thirteen I showed my teacher the stories I wrote before I sent them to magazines. He didn’t discourage or flatter me, either, but Esquire didn’t bite.

All this brings up another question for somebody like me much later in life, perhaps predictably. Are writers gamblers at heart? Is it strange to think there might be resemblances between the two? Both risk precious assets. In one case, time and intellectual energy and earning capacity; in the other, time, intellectual energy, and cash money. Serious exposure, then, for both. Both may yearn for the big payout. Is the payout for an author obvious? Riches, fame, awards? It may be true what Samuel Johnson said, that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” and who would be fool enough to take on Dr. Johnson? He’s inarguably correct to this extent: a writer without audience is often in dire straits, emotionally or psychologically and usually financially. Not to say that pleasing the public is ever the unalloyed objective of a good writer, nor does the measure of interest in a writer define achievement or success or satisfaction however defined—sales, likes, viral tweets, movie deals, book prizes, and so on. Well, that’s the story of me, and I’m sticking to it.

Literary history is the chronicle of great writers disregarded or demeaned by their contemporaries; the tale of writers who created the audience for their work before the public was ready. But not so fast, buddy boy. For every obscure Joyce, there’s a rabidly popular Shakespeare; for every moody arcane dead-lettering Melville, there’s a show-stopping celebrity Dickens. Yet it was T. S. Eliot who said that, for the purposes of cultural advancement, a good poet is as valuable as a great poet, and may be more important. I never cared much for the world-famous Gentleman from Saint Louis’s cult of impersonality or his poetry (except for “Prufrock”), and his essays have not worn well over time. But as for most writers, why pony up to the betting window in the first place? I can only speak for myself.

For me, I’m not sure where to find the writer’s betting window. Unless it’s inside myself. I’ll never find out immediately after the working writer’s equivalent of a football game, a race, a hand of cards, what I have earned. I do my work, and that is its own reward, if there is one. If somebody reads it and finds momentary delight, that’s a bonus, more than enough for me. If I lose a bet on the Warriors, say, I have lost my money, true. If I lose a bet on a book, if, that is, the reviewers ignore it or dismiss it, if readers stay away in droves, what have I lost? Snark monsters wield sharp knives. Honestly, it can be depressing recognition, even if I can expertly fake insouciance, and even if the bottle of Irish beckons with its midday Siren’s call. But one goes on. At least I have gone on, so far. That inclination may link to my lifelong disposition, coming straight out of my Brooklyn with a father like mine; it may indeed be that I am congenitally undiscourageable. Resilient or stubborn? Survivor or deluded fool? Or maybe too dense to absorb the message from the universe? Then again, my suspicion is that, ever since the Big Bang, the “universe” is probably too preoccupied to bother imparting a message to anyone, least of all me.

As my old man put it so memorably to me as a young writer, poetry won’t pay the light bill. But if I am lucky, as I have been once or twice, I might confiscate some electricity, enough to illuminate my way for a while anyway.

In this context, there’s one more thing I might say about my dad and mom and it’s something that, at this late date, surprises me to acknowledge. They were indeed incredibly difficult people, essentially unmanageable and maddening and unfathomably irrational. But some days I do miss them. Particularly my father. I feel sad for him, for the life he led and for the life he didn’t or the life he never conceived, to the extent that maybe this whole book in your hands is an elegy to him—and maybe also to my childhood and my brother's. If I could explain these feelings to my satisfaction, hundred to one I would have never written a single word.